


Women of the Deep

by posingasme



Category: Supernatural, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover Pairings, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:41:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26277337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/posingasme/pseuds/posingasme
Summary: Meg is in the Empty. Quynh is in the ocean. It doesn’t get any deeper than that for two warriors suffering betrayal and loss in the face of eternity.
Relationships: Quynh/Meg Masters
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	Women of the Deep

It was the first thing Meg had heard in all her time in the Empty. It had startled her out of her sleep, and it had caused severe disorientation as she tried to locate her angel blade for defense against whatever was making the noise.

“Ignore it,” The Voice snarled. “She goes away eventually. She is an illusion, and nothing more. Sleep, demon.”

But Meg had heard it, and it was not an illusion. That is, no more than anything else in this Void. The eternally weary entity made her sleep again, and she did not awaken for over a year.

Suddenly, there it was again, as though no time had passed. A voice. Not The Voice. Not the voice of the Entity that stalked the nothing here. A voice. A human. But not a human, right? This was no place for a human. Humans had Heaven and they had Hell, and under very weird circumstances, after a bite or some other misfortune, they had Purgatory, or so claimed those Leviathan things. Not a human. But not anything other than a human either.

“Giúp tôi!”

At last she had heard the voice clearly. It was strange, as though spoken from under water. But Meg recognized the words immediately.

Help me.

It was very ancient, this accent, but Meg remembered the language. It was her first, after all.

“Xin chào,” she called out in a tentative greeting. She proceeded in her native Vietnamese, which she had not used for centuries. “Who is there?”

“Help me!” the watery voice wailed again.

Meg crept along the nothing, feeling her way in spite of the fact that there was no true ground, nor anything else for that matter. She had a little bit of an understanding of where she was. Alistair had mumbled about the Empty when he worked, when he felt particularly poetic and religious. She distinctly remembered an angel blade rupturing her last form, and she had guessed that was where she was now. Nothing. Nowhere.

But who else was here? Who else was awake?

“Help me!”

“Who are you?”

“I am Quỳnh Tiên,” the voice screamed, “and I cannot stop!”

“Stop what?” Meg demanded. She could not locate the voice in this nothing, and so she simply became still and listened.

“Living! Over and over, no matter how many times…” The voice faded away with a gurgle, and Meg felt a coldness that told her it was gone again.

How long did she sleep this time? How long had the voice been gone? How many hours or eons had Meg dozed while part of her strained to hear the woman’s cry again?

“She is always here,” The Voice of the Entity grumbled. “I can always hear her incessant complaints. She eludes my influence, at once in a part of this Void and immediately in another part, evading me always, for so many years. And you! You’re meant to sleep! First the infuriating angel, and now you!”

Infuriating angel. Meg smirked at that. She had known a few in her time, and it amused her now to think perhaps her Castiel had once annoyed this Entity just as she was doing now. “Who is she?”

“Go back to sleep, you insufferable-“

“Who?” She let her tone darken, as if she could possibly threaten this being. “I want to know who she is. Then I’ll sleep.”

An ever-woeful sigh came from nowhere. “She is called Quỳnh Tiên,” he snapped. “It means-“

“Deep red. And…”

“Immortal,” the Entity spat sourly. “As if anything so small as an angel or demon or...whatever she is could be called that.”

“Why does she come here?”

“The same reason you all do. Now will you-“

Meg frowned. “She’s dead? Then why does she still scream?”

The Voice gave another exasperated sigh. “Because she is without a reaper, and never stays as she should. She dies again and again. She reminds me of Prometheus, the thorn in my pillow, who died daily for ages, except that she was a far less frequent visitor until a few centuries past. And now, when she comes, she screams. Even Prometheus simply grumbled to himself.”

She quieted. “She dies, over and over, every few years?”

The irritation in the Entity’s tone was laced with madness. “No! Every few minutes! You only hear her when her screams reach the part of the Void in which you rest, but I hear her all the time!”

The demon felt horror grip her tightly. “How does she die?”

“Too much water will kill anything eventually. And too much water will continue to kill something that refuses to stay dead. Dead things should stay dead. If I could smite the idiots who put her in that iron box and tossed her into Earth’s ocean…”

Meg shuddered. She had heard of a mythical thing called a Ma’lak box, which, if it could ever actually be created, would contain even an archangel. It was forged of the same magic as the cage in Hell which housed Lucifer, and now Michael. Alistair had muttered about the best torture he could devise for Michael at the end of the world, snatching up the righteous adversary in his vessel, dumping him into this box, and tossing it into the deepest part of the ocean. Trapping an immortal in a watery grave for all eternity was agony invisioned by the Grand Master of Torture himself, and yet pre-modern humans had done it to a Vietnamese woman without a bit of magic in their armory. Meg was horrified and a little impressed.

“Just want to sleep,” the Entity was whining again.

She cleared her throat, which was at least as ridiculous as the Void Voice sighing. “Let me help her, and then we can all sleep.”

There was a silence so deep that it made her dizzy in its wake. It lasted an unknowable amount of time, then at last, it broke. “Help her,” the Entity mused, as though it had not occurred to him in all this time. “Help the Quỳnh Tiên. Yes. Yes, do that. Help her. Make her stop, and then I can rest again the way I used to, before screaming water hags and rebel angels and curious demons began clawing for my attention. Yes. Go.”

At once, Meg gasped to find herself surrounded by equal darkness but intense cold and pressure. It was what she registered first, but in the next instant, she realized she was alive, or at least as much as she had been as a black smoke demon, and was unmistakably on Earth, in a very deep ocean. The water would not harm her in this form, and she could move in spite of the painful pressure. She was seething around a frozen tomb. Schandmantel, she realized with disgust. She had encountered one or two while in Alistair’s employ. They were iron maidens without the spikes. Alistair had enjoyed placing souls inside with various creeping serpents.

She tore open the medieval device, and found a woman’s form inside. It writhed weakly, then quickly went still, nearly frozen in place. It was incredible that the bones were still in place, considering the wicked pressure down here. Meg curled her smoke around the figure and reached toward daylight. Twice on the journey, the woman awoke and tried to scream, but each time, she died within seconds. On a beach, on a tiny, remote island in the Mediterranean, they finally surfaced, and Meg dropped her on the beach with exhaustion.

She watched from her incorporeal form as the husk of a human female began to show signs of movement again. What could possibly become of this horrific thing which once had been…

Human.

The human’s shape was returning to her. She vomited seawater, and her brokenness healed. Her unrecognizable flesh softened, her eyes blinked, her lips parted. She took several breaths. She seemed to see Meg, and in that instant, she died one more time, a silent and restful death for the first time in centuries, and was still and peaceful for several minutes.

Meg waited with fascination.

When the woman began breathing again, when her eyes cleared and focused, she seemed to have healed even further than before. What threads remained of whatever she had been wearing were discarded with disgust onto the beach.

Naked and new, Quỳnh Tiên stood on the beach and closed her eyes, smiling up at the sunlight with enormous relief. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and she laughed and laughed.

Meg had never seen anything so beautiful. She ventured nearer. She had to know this woman, this warrior woman who refused Death so completely. She smoked in through the laughing mouth, gently, so as not to cause the woman any new trauma.

Inside the mind of this ancient thing was madness at a level Meg had never seen. Alistair himself would have fled it. But Meg stayed, and shared space with her host.

“Who are you?” the lips breathed aloud.

Meg spoke inside her mind, in the same vernacular. “I am Meg. I was once Sen Huyen.”

The woman smiled. “Black lotus,” she murmured in English.

For some reason, it pleased Meg to hear her old name translated into her most recently acquired language. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Though many called me Tam Huyen instead.” Black heart. She had been a terror in life, a female bodyguard, confidant and lover of a warrior queen near the border with China.

This revelation made her new friend smile. “But you are called Meg now?”

“Yes. I prefer it after all this time.”

Quỳnh nodded. “What are you?”

“I’m a demon.”

If it shocked the woman, there was no sign of it. She simply nodded again. “You saved me. Why?”

“You asked someone to help you. No one else ever did.”

“Thank you, Meg Huyen.”

“You can take care of yourself from here, I think.”

The lips curved into a wicked sneer. “I can. But who watches over you, con quỷ xinh đẹp?

Meg managed a shrug inside the woman’s mind. “I find my own way, as you do.”

“Then make your way with me, Meg, tình yêu của tôi. I once traveled with a breathtaking warrior woman with no end. I’d like to do that now. And for what I have in mind for my new life, I may need a demon to guide me.”

Pleasure and excitement flowed through her, and she settled more comfortably into the woman’s strong body, curling into the sharp corners of the maze in her mind with ease. “We’ve both been dead a while. It may be nice to walk the world again. I’m made to tie myself to a warrior and serve a cause. I’ve always done so. You seem a worthy cause.”

The mad smirk on Quỳnh’s face promised her an ongoing life of mischief and battle. Meg thrilled inside the body which carried her willingly. She was back from the Empty. It was time to be bad again.


End file.
